


Anopsia

by orphan_account



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, aftermath of Yharnam Sunrise ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 22:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6925378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is wrong with the world. She knows that, just as surely as she knows something is wrong with her. It drives her to seek, to pursue the ineffable at the core of her own existence with the fervor of a hound that has scented blood.</p><p>It drives her to him.</p><p>Post-Yharnam Sunrise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anopsia

Her dreams spin, a vague, formless mass of scarlet, of stone and fur and gelatinous fog, of eyes upon eyes upon eyes. Her nightmares are black and silent, impossible to remember, but she wakes shaking, sweat-damp, hand to her throat over some invisible echo of an end. Instinct and muscles do not forget. She supposes that whatever her mind has undergone is less forgetting than excision, remnants of infestation festering at the edges of her consciousness, an uncauterized wound.

Something is wrong with the world. She knows that, just as surely as she knows something is wrong with her. Certain smells make her hands clench, her body brace itself for something that does not come. A particular laying of brick, light hitting an alleyway at a specific angle, the set of a man's jaw. Time passing mundanely until unknown elements align and cut through her, glass-sharp, evoking nervous system responses with no identifiable meaning. Each day, frustration. Knowledge at the tip of her brain, yet inaccessible. It drives her to seek, to pursue the ineffable at the core of her own existence with the fervor of a hound that has scented blood.

It drives her to him.

 

* * *

 

  
She finds the lecture hall more full than she would have expected. Students, the curious, the bored. Gawkers. A parade of guest lecturers on various facets of spirituality and mysticism address the crowd, and she finds it all melting together into a meaningless slurry. Every so often a phrase will trip the very edge of something in her head, but not enough.

After some time, a pallid man takes the podium. As he begins to speak, a fragment of that something crystallizes sharply enough to knock the breath from her. She does not recognize him, but the fire in his words, voice cast confidently into the cavernous space, glimmers in the void of her mind like the hint of a long-lost dream.

_As you once did..._

_Grant us..._

_As you once did for..._

_Grant us... grant us..._

She scarcely notices the rustling around her as the seats begin to empty, nor the slight dimming of the lights. A few of the scholars remain near the front, chatting amongst themselves. The pale man gathers scattered papers.

"Micolash," she reads. She stares at the lecture program in her hand, not the man now a few feet in front of her. The name stirs no familiarity in her.

Too-wide smile stretches thinly. "Yes?"

She studies him now, finds his hair is dark and tousled, his eyes palest blue, his features sharp. His entire manner is taut, restless, a thin skin stretched to contain a maelstrom.

He tilts his head. "You're far too quiet for someone who looks as though she's brimming with questions. Let's see, which is it? Have I scandalized you with my outlandish theories? Stirred your curiosity? Or perhaps you forgot to take notes and your instructor is expecting a paper... but you haven't the mien of a student." He pauses. "I do think well of my own work, but I'd not consider it enough to strike someone dumb. Come now, miss."

"I..." Her cheek twitches. "I've no particular question to ask. I have far too many."

"Mm, as I said, I can see as much." One corner of his smile curls higher. "Start somewhere, else I'm not certain how I can assist you."

"You must understand the difficulty in choosing. I want to understand everything."

"Indeed. Don't we all."

"It's only that..." She sighs, frustrated. "Have we met before?"

His smile fades. "Ah." He finishes gathering his papers, folds his arms around them. "That's a rather odd question. Impolite of me to have forgotten you, if we have, but I don't think that's the case." For a moment he studies her, something shifting in his eyes. "Mayhap in a dream, eh?" He grins at her, then bows slightly. "Pardon me, but I've an appointment. I'm sure we can continue this... enlightening conversation at another time."

He turns to go but she follows him, down a corridor into the depths of the school. "I want to learn everything you know. About the way you think the world works. I'm looking for something, you see."

"Naturally. What exactly are you looking for?"

"I... don't know how to explain it. For myself, I suppose."

"How delightfully metaphysical."

She catches his elbow and he turns to face her, his brow furrowing. "Haven't you ever felt like there's something _off_ about the world? Like... like we're muddling about in the dark only because we can't figure out how to remove our blindfolds, ants in the shadow of... of..." She feels her face reddening and drops her hand, lowering her head. "I cannot bear it any longer. This feeling. I've reached the point where I need to either numb it entirely or finally tear off the bandages and see what's beneath. Whatever might..." She inhales sharply and laughs once without humor. "Or perhaps I'm simply mad. There's quite a lot of that going around."

One long finger slips beneath her chin and tilts her head up. His pale eyes gleam like fever. "You are not mad. Never allow yourself to believe that you are." After a moment that lingers a bit too long, he lowers his hand. "It so happens that I have been casting about for an assistant. The pool I have to choose from is so dreadfully staid and conventional it almost makes one lose hope."

"I'll do it."

He chuckles. "I've not even asked you anything yet."

"You may as well have."

"Well then. Hmm." He shuffles his papers. "Do you have a name, miss confused-yet-insistent?"

Her lips part, but she pauses. The name her mother gave her seems so foreign now, so distant from whatever clouded nightmare her existence has become. A name for a pretty girl in a pretty house, living a pretty life.

"It's Claudette," she says. "No one of importance, I'm afraid."

"That remains to be seen." A shadow flickers across his expression, gone so quickly she might have imagined it.

 

* * *

 

Gradually the interminable days grow more bearable, given focus as she follows him. Her nights are no different. She expects they never will be. She learns all she can, folklore and legends, philosophies and psychological theories. She aids him in endless forages through archives, libraries, oral histories of peasants in dusty back alleys, sermons in sun-drenched stone, clandestine meetings in velvet-lined halls. Hours in between spent in an office packed with books to its high ceiling, smelling of musty paper, smoke, and metal. In her head a great castle is being built, or perhaps a labyrinth, swirling endlessly upward, toward... what? The frustration within her only grows the further her mind expands.

He is descending. He was already far past her, drowning in whispers, fingertips stretching to breach the veil. Each day seems to turn him paler and more gaunt, half-moons darkening beneath eyes bright with nameless fever. Sometimes she repeats his name when she is alone, her eyes closed, trying to trip whatever trap holds the reason for her sense of familiarity with him, to no avail. His voice roils through her, a clarion call onward, and the more time she spends with him the more she decides that she must know him, must have known him in some nebulous _before._ Surely that echo is of a guide, a teacher.

There was a house on a hill, somewhere, once. She knows that, as much as she knows anything. Whenever she smells flowers carried on a light breeze, an afterimage of it returns to her. He is not there. He is somewhere else, something else.

_Do you hear our..._

"'Reality is an illusion, yet everything is real.'" He leans against the wall of his office, massive book clasped in his long-fingered hands. "'Nothingness and everything-ness. It is this contradiction that sits uneasily at the heart of existence.'"

She is sitting at his desk, transcribing selected passages from a work on metallurgy. It is long past midnight, she knows, though the office is windowless. She lays down her pen and sits back, listening, though she suspects Micolash is reading to no one in particular. The text chills her, though she could not say precisely why.

"'Yet if it is an illusion,'" he murmurs, "'whose illusion is it? Does it exist in itself, creatorless? Orphaned? Created by all in a vast collective hallucination? Created by a particular consciousness, or consciousnesses? If so, whose? Is dream a better term than illusion? Layer upon layer of dream? Again, whose? And what might transpire should the dreamer wake?'" He falls silent, frowning.

"Which book is that?" she asks.

He shrugs, a gesture that comes off more like a shudder. "One of Willem's treatises."

"Ah. I should have known, from the tone."

"Mm." He closes the book and shelves it, his back to her. "It's there, you know. We are right at the cusp. _Right_ at it. If I could only see the edge of the cliff, to know where to leap, I would. I could do nothing else. Why can I not see it?" He strikes the wall with his fist, startling her.

A chill snakes up her spine, dragging her up out of her chair. She steps toward him. A trap in her mind closes. "Eyes," she says under her breath. "That's what it is. Grant us eyes."

"What?" He turns slowly, staring at her. "What did you say?"

She trembles, blood rushing in her head. "Grant us eyes."

"Grant us..." He runs a shaky hand through his hair. "I've heard that phrase. Willem or... or Caryll, perhaps, or another scholar entirely. Surely. Where did you get it from?"

"I don't know. I don't remember." She frowns. "You must have read it to me, once, and I've forgotten. I can hear it said in your voice."

"No. If I had, it wouldn't strike me so oddly." He grips her shoulders. "Think. Tell me where you heard it."

"I said I don't know." The coldness of his hands leeches through to her skin. "If I did, I would tell you. We're honest with one another, are we not?"

"I never insinuated that you were lying. Only..." His grip loosens a fraction, but he does not release her. "It's that same problem. The same damnable... It's there, but I cannot reach it. Can you even understand? Have you any idea what I would give to know? To slice through to the marrow of the world, flayed and laid bare? Anything." He shakes her slightly. "Anything."

She says nothing, gaze fixed on his. Every instinct burns, memory, howling in the dark, glimpses sealed tight as iron, thick in the silence.

After a moment, a muscle in his cheek twitches and he shakes his head. "Ah, but... I do know you. We hadn't met before the lecture - couldn't have - but I... admit that I was not surprised when you approached me. I saw you, in the crowd. Something about your face. Not in the eyes, just..." He raises one hand to block the top part of her head. "Your mouth. Your jaw. I could not say. The shadow of a memory, with no context." Slowly he lowers his hand, dragging his fingertips along her jawline and neck to her upper arm again in an odd caress.

"I know your voice," she says quietly. "I cannot explain it."

"And familiarity is supposed to bring comfort, yes? Do you feel comfort?"

"No. It makes me very uneasy. I want to understand it, but it unnerves me." She swallows hard. "And you?"

He smiles wanly. "I feel fear."

"Of what?"

"Not any one thing, precisely. But there is..." His brow furrows, hands tracing up and down her arms. "There is something within you. I can feel it. You are not like me, not truly. That fire in you might take you to the utter limits of our world, but it's less an inquisitive drive than a sort of... predatory one. And there are lines I'd cross that you would not. I cannot imagine otherwise. You would not follow me all the way upward."

The room spins with the fragmentary images running through her mind. Dust upon silent death, motes swirling in a beam of light. Scarlet-black spears. An infant's carriage.

_Do you hear our prayers?_

The cage snaps closed.

She tilts her head up slightly. "Try me."

"I shall." Darkness flickers in his pale eyes. "Oh, I shall." Roughly he leans down and kisses her, sharp and feverish, arms wrapping tightly around her. He tastes of heat and ashes and salt water, and her brain immediately registers the utter wrongness of it even as her lips part and her arms slip around his neck. A chuckle catches in his throat. Her fingernails dig into his skin hard enough to wound, her own body shivering. Blood sings in her veins with the tide of her rising pulse and the deepening kiss, the screams in her head falling silent as she lets herself drown in it.

 

* * *

  

She follows. He is as ravenous with her as he is with everything, as obsessive, but if anything the expending of energy only fuels his pursuit of knowledge rather than lessening it. She is uncertain when he actually sleeps. Whenever she stirs - if he is even still beside her - he is awake and gazing at the ceiling even as his fingers twine idly through her hair.

"It's right here," he muses once. "Have you considered that? _Cosmos_  smacks of grandiosity, of distance, but it is the definition of mundane. It's everywhere. It's right above our heads."

"Tell it that voyeurism is rude," she mumbles, half-asleep.

He laughs and draws her tight against his chest, pressing kisses to her forehead and cheeks. His skin is always cold.

His studies take him further and further afield. Late-night rituals, expeditions to the far reaches of society for one rare ingredient or another, ventures deep within the tunnels beneath the city. Things had begun to shift between them. More often than not, her time working with him is spent in his office, compiling what he's learned, rather than out doing the research itself. He will smile, say that the work is too dangerous or even boring. Sometimes he takes a few students, but often he goes alone. She watches him grow more physically strained each day, yet if anything his manner is happier. They are making progress, after all, finding correlations and repeated references to lend credence to their theories. Dreams, reality, truth high above, and behind it all...

Behind it all...

_Grant us eyes._

The lack of journeying with him is not entirely his decision. She declines on occasion as well, busying herself with her own endeavors. Improving her physical skills appeals to her for reasons she cannot identify. She practices with a few like-minded individuals she meets here and there on her wanderings through the city. The contrast strikes her: Micolash returns with wounds on his mind, while hers are on her body - cuts and bruises he caresses with strange gentleness and no questions. She does not know what to do. No touch could heal anyone's mind, she fears, certainly not either of theirs.

There is no way to go but onward.

One late afternoon she's practicing pistol skills with a devout but friendly gentleman by the name of Alfred, a man who could not be any more unlike her if he tried. He prefers heavy blunt weaponry to using a gun at all; she'd rather a blunderbuss than a pistol, but the wood and steel still feel good in her grip. As she's reloading, she suddenly feels a hand snake lightly around her throat and another around her waist. She barely startles; the softly musty scent of old books and seawater could only be one person. He kisses the back of her neck and lets her go. When she turns, she finds Micolash standing there with his hands in his pockets, his cheeks somehow more hollow than usual, the circles under his eyes a shade darker.

"Evening," he says.

Alfred clears his throat, eyebrows raised. "Sneaking up on an armed person is ill-advised. Safety is imperative when we're - "

"Safety is hardly one of my concerns." Micolash grins, broad and without humor, and she frowns at his expression. It fades quickly as he glances at her. "I've something to show you, if you like." He sets off without another word.

"Pardon my intrusion," Alfred says quietly, "but as a friend, I would recommend... caution with that one. Forgive me, I fear there is something a bit wrong with him."

"Yes." She smiles faintly, noticing again Alfred's slightly misshapen pupils. Seeing them makes something sink in her stomach. "There's something wrong with all of us."

He opens his mouth to speak, then stops and lowers his head, wordless.

She follows after Micolash, down alleys and corridors lined with dust and litter. "Enjoying target practice?" he asks without glancing back at her.

"It is a useful skill to have."

"To what end?" Before she can answer, he goes on, "Your sparring partner's quite the church type."

"Seems to be. We've not talked much about - "

"Handsome, too, in a lily-white sort of way. Fit." Micolash's voice is oddly lifeless. "Is that why you practice with him?"

"No." She frowns. "Are you... jealous or something? I'd hardly thought that you - "

"Do what you want. Have him, if you like."

She grabs Micolash by the arm and stops him, forcing him to face her. "Why are you being like this? What's wrong? You are not acting like yourself."

One corner of his mouth twists in a weak attempt at a smile. "No? I hardly know who _myself_ is, these days. So much is shifting."

"Has something happened?"

He half-shakes his head, and she notices his hands are trembling. "No. Perhaps. I don't know." He runs a hand through his hair. "Just... come and see."

Turning, he leads her on until they reach a small, crooked doorway. The door creaks as he pushes it open, revealing what appears to be a small, abandoned metalworkers' shop. It feels like her heart stops dead as she steps inside. Micolash starts saying something about frequencies, about energy and the vibration level of siderite and cosmic wave patterns, but she barely hears any of it.

On the table in front of her is a cage. Tall, primitive, roughly welded, perhaps a foot in diameter. The object itself is mundane but something about it triggers nameless terror in the pit of her gut.

A church strewn with bodies in the dust. Motes caught in light. A cliff... a staircase. Endless staircases. Mirrors and fog and howling echoes between them. A tall shadow. Metal bars smelling of blood and ozone.

_Grant us eyes, grant us eyes. Plant eyes on our brains and -_

She reels back from the table, gasping, clutching her temples as if to hold her pounding head together.

"Do you see?" Strange laughter darkens the edge of his voice. He stares at the cage, not at her. "It's so obvious now. To think that I -" He glances at her and his expression immediately shifts to one of concern. "What is it? Are you all right?"

She shakes her head, trying to force her breathing to even out. Her whole body trembles as she struggles to focus, grasping at the fragmented images - memories? Nightmares?

"Everything is going to be fine," he says. She looks up at him and though he is smiling, his pale eyes are wide and glossy with tears. "I'm going to do it. There is no need to be afraid any longer."

"I don't understand." Her stomach roils. "I cannot - I don't understand. What are you going to do?"

"What must be done." He cradles her face in his hands. "It's all right, love. Do not be frightened. There is so much above us, so much awaiting us. Nothing can stand in our way now."

Fog shifts. Cracking glass, distant footsteps. Her heart thuds. "Then why are you crying?"

"I..." He touches his cheek with a perplexed expression, then smiles again, strange and false. "I... I am not certain. I am happy, yes? That's it. I'm pleased that I have finally made this breakthrough. Quite literally. Breaking through and upward to what lies behind. The veil has always been thin, so thin, and it is tearing now. I shall facilitate its rending. Is that not wondrous?" He shudders. "Wondrous, yes, all is wondrous. We will no longer be blind. We need never be frightened again."

_Plant eyes on our brains and cleanse our beastly..._

"You are frightening _me_ right now," she says. She pulls away from him, trying not to look at the cage on the table. Every glimpse of it feels like it is driving needles in behind her eyes. "I want to understand, to see the truth - you know I do - but there is something wrong with that thing. There's something wrong with..." She hesitates.

"With me?" He smiles, but she sees him flinch. "Of course there is. But this is how it's taken away, how all the little blind corners in my head are illuminated. Will you not..." He pauses, his smile fading, then he laughs humorlessly. "Ah. We have found it, then. The line you will not follow me across. Is that it?" He reaches out and drags a fingertip along her jawline a bit too roughly. "Is that it, my sweet one?"

The musty scent of books, endless books, endless passageways. All faces obscured. An echoing howl thrills up her spine. She takes a breath. "I've not said that."

"No?" His hand glides down the column of her neck. "Tell me... tell me that you'll come with me." His voice wavers. "Please."

Steadily she meets his eyes. "I will be with you, to the end." The words ring in her chest with the cold finality of gunshots. 

 

* * *

 

That night their coupling is frantic and rough, no words exchanged, and the physical certainty of pain and his hands around her throat brings her comfort as it always does. It is not enough. Her mind is reeling, her heart an echoing aching void of loss that she cannot identify. He holds her afterward, gentle and kind, his skin cold as the dead. She feels tears trickle onto her skin and says nothing, only clinging as tightly to him as she can. He murmurs something she does not quite catch, the words muffled in her hair.

Sleep finds her with inescapable tangling fingers dragging her inside but something -

Something -

Something shifts and she is falling and the cold scent of metal and coppery scarlet, an old man, creaking wheels, the horrid shadow of a -

_The nightmare swirls and churns unending._

The hunt begins. Begins again. Had never stopped. Ouroboros, labyrinth of dream, sealed tomb. She hunts because that is who she is. Blood, blood, so much blood, blood to drown the world, and she does not stop because she cannot. The corrupted hunter, the poisoned rending flesh, the weeping screaming pale beast. The storm-corpse, the shadows, the brood and its mother at the white heart of the veil, the false many-armed god. The village, once hidden, infested with eldritch creatures clinging parasitic to its shattered bones. The bells. The bells...

A profane amalgamation of living corpses drools down from the bloodshot moon and she fights it, swings her saw-spear to the verge of exhaustion, darting in the dance she knows well until it falls truly dead in a rain of viscera. In the now-silent grounds she trudges onward, pushes open the chapel doors at the end of the yard.

Something tugs at her brain. She knows this place, the motes of dust catching in weak beams of sunlight, bodies lining the walls, seated, their heads locked within bizarre contraptions. She knows them. She -

Against the back wall is seated a corpse that is clearly the central figure, arms resting on the arms of its chair like a twisted king upon his throne. A great tall cage like the others rests on its shoulders, trapping its skull. She knows those scholar's clothes, the posture, even in death, and she chokes back a cry.

_Even in a..._

Shivering, she stretches out her hand and touches his desiccated arm.

With a violet, violent tug she is drawn into another nightmare, though surely all is nightmare, every second of her life is nightmare, always has been and always will be, inescapable even through waking. There is no outer layer, no chrysalis to emerge from, no true victory to achieve.

Still she fights.

Black sky, rotting beasts, a distant something that sends her mind reeling into madness with each exposure. By the time she reaches the great library, each footstep is dull and fatalistic. She knows. She _knows_. She dispatches bizarre masked creatures and skeletal marionettes without thought, each movement automatic, and steps through the doorway like a sleepwalker.

A tall shadow on the wall. A figure turns, elegant posture, confidence in each movement. Behind the heavy cage's bars, a pallid face, gaunt and sickly, dark hair disheveled, pale blue eyes fevered and piercing. His lips part but no words emerge as he stops, staring, everything draining from his expression until all that remains is shock.

Her whole body shakes, knuckles white on her weapons.

Micolash laughs, an empty, mad sound that rises and cracks into an anguished howling scream as arcane cephalopodan fingers close around her throat, merging with her sobs as she pulls the trigger.


End file.
